You know you read too much Apartment Therapy when you can walk into any room, anywhere, and name by type each and every piece of Ikea within.
I made this collage instead of doing real work
Some Ikea I completely adore:
- I kiss our Ikea butcher block counters thrice daily.
- Our Ikea Bekvam kitchen cart and Ingo dining table are looking pretty snappy these days.
- And I’ve just started a brand new love affair with Ikea Groland – in the bathroom.
- As for Paolo – their meatballs define his happy place.
Bad Ikea is the stuff you spot a mile off:
- “We can’t afford real furniture, but we’re hoping you won’t notice.”
- “I’ve had this since 1st year university – and I’m covering the dents with a black Sharpie.”
- “MDF? What’s not to love?”
Sorry Ikea Hacks, I’ve come today to denounce your main pillar: Expedit. Specifically, the black bookcase.
Why no Expedit love?
Black Expedit eats small spaces. Dust sticks to it like glue. Dusting the black one twice a day wouldn’t be enough. Here’s and how where I’ve tested it:
1) Ikea Expedit as a console or room divider
In a blaze of Expedit-exasperation, I decided one afternoon at our last apartment that it had to go. I dragged it out of the bedroom to await a Craigslist buyer. It landed behind our sectional couch, just next to the dining table.
Wait a second…what we have here is a console! A poor man’s console.
Temporarily, Expedit worked as a buffer between living and dining areas, keeping our spaces separate and our sanity in tact. Still, its presence rankled. Is it the most unoriginal thing you can own?
2) Ikea Expedit as clutter-HQ
Like many apartments, ours had no obvious place to keep handbags, wallets or keys. Except the bedroom closet – and that’s weird and annoying. Expedit was suddenly our stash-everything HQ. Cameras, CDs, magazines, photo albums, bags, umbrellas, gloves, filing boxes – everything. As you can see – it’s a disorganized, messy heap.
3) Ikea Expedit as an ugly hiding spot
Its cubbies are too huge and its interiors so dark that it’s easy to lose things. It’s storage, sure, but on its own it’s not organized storage. We could throw any/all clutter at it and Expedit would gladly swallow it whole. It keeps its murky secrets well.
4) Ikea Expedit as a greedy room-eater
While unfurnished spaces are said to look smaller, this wasn’t true in Expedit’s case. It’s huge, black and chunky – surely the last thing you want in a small space? On moving day, once the black behemoth, and its friend the chunky black Lack coffee table, were gone – the empty apartment looked twice as big. We’d been drowning in dark, abused Ikea.
How to live happily ever-after with Ikea Expedit?
- Choose the white one – for starters, you won’t have to dust it 3 times a day.
- Buy the extra bits and pieces – the bins, the baskets, the magazine holders. Left as 8 spare cubes, it becomes a garbage chute in no time at all.
- Don’t give it pride of place in your living room – hide the baddie in an office, maybe.
- Lay out all the things you want it to store before you buy it. I really wanted Expedit to change my life – but might have been better off with a chest of drawers and a filing cabinet.
My tepid relationship with Expedit has sparked an unofficial tangent to the ugly baby project: ditching all our obvious Ikea along the way. Surely we’ll get to that once we’ve tackled Canada’s ugliest bathroom? To find out, subscribe now!
Update!!! Our Expedit has been rehabilitated and painted white, winning us over as the perfect laundry room storage.
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Full photo credit (here we go), from top row L-R: striatic, uemu, bebal, The Consumerist, OiMax, back_garage, MarkWallace, raquelrocksdotnet, heartbeaz, Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar, striatic and Per Ola Wiberg ~ Powi via Flickr Creative Commons. Whew!
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It must be IKEA week in the blogosphere, because Holly at Nothing But Bonfires recently posted about the fights that happen between spouses at IKEA (we’ve had our fair share of them ourselves)
http://nothingbutbonfires.com/2010/09/adventures-in-ikea
Some of their stuff is really long lasting – I’ve had a white Billy bookcase for almost thirty years and we’re still using the dining set my parents bought from there around the same time period (real wood, timeless) – while other pieces seem to be made of cardboard and don’t last a year. It’s hit and miss.
I’ll always love that place though…even if we win the lottery and can afford $10,000 couches.
Haha – just read her post – it’s spot on. I do love Ikea and all the fancy trappings and organizing innards – but I can no longer love those specific items in-my-living-room. Maybe Billy will outlast us all?
Lauren, I’m right with you! My husband and I bought a Lack coffee table a couple of years ago and I wanted to puke every time I saw it – could have been the fact that it was white and had stains from God knows what on it. Anyways, it is in the garage now.
Haha! Ours (black
beautyugly) is holding a bucket of joint compound and I’m not-so-secretly hoping it gets wrecked. White must show dirt very badly? Bleh.I also have the lack coffee table but out it a the foot of our bed with some pillows and it looks pretty good. And I can store all my flip flops in that tiny little shelf.
I could see that being a really useful place for it – and I’m already jealous at the size of your bedroom! Probably a better place to store shoes than our current use: DVD player. You have to fully prostrate yourself every time you want to watch Glee re-runs.
How funny. There’s something in the water (Swedish meatballs?). I posted about IKEA and my struggles to assemble their stuff twice this week: http://gilliandrummond.net/2010/09/disassembly-required/
and…
http://gilliandrummond.net/2010/09/a-bit-of-modern-funky-fun/
But despite the hiccups, I adore IKEA. Would draw the line at buying a ‘real’ sofa there, and there’s plenty to get snobby about. But you can’t beat some of their shelves, and also the Akurum kitchens. Loving your blog, BTW. It’s been on my blogroll for a while.
Hi Gillian! Ooh thanks, you’ve made my morning. Maybe Ikea posts mark the autumn version of spring cleaning? I’ll head over to read yours in full right now. Would love to join in lengthily Ikea snobbery, any day. (Perhaps cafeteria-side, over some cinnamon buns?)
Would love to if I lived around the corner. But you’re up there and I’m almost in Mexico. So virtual chat and sticky fingers at the computer it will have to be.
Sounds fair enough to me!
dude are we related? I too had the expedit in my old apartment and the lack coffee table in my other old apartment! I love IKEA but those two items were bleh…they got old really fast and were crapply made. I second this post!:)
Haha! Probably! When the renovating bug takes hold – and you’ve sacrificed heart and hamstring to a nice(r) home – you’re far less willing to make do. Plus we know how far equivalent $$ will go on Craigslist for some come-and-get-me knotty pine.
Hi Lauren,
Came across this as I searched for “IKEA Expedit reviews.”
I moved into my own studio this week, its a dream- perfect neighborhood, perfect size (Im a single guy and a designer) I fancied the IKEA Expedit for the longest time for my workstation needs, until I read your critique and I am nervous when you say that “it eats small spaces.” Can you tell me if you used the entire workstation (this guy: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S99861340) or just the bookcase?
I am in the early stages of my IKEA nesting instinct. I did read good reviews of this workstation elsewhere, but want to have a balanced view.
Hope you did find nicer alternatives!
Thanks much,
Rishi
Hi Rishi! Congrats on the new studio. A few thoughts on the Expedit (now I’ve had a year to calm down)…they might not help or apply in your case, but just my take:
– We have the black one (the 8x cubby bookcase one)… as well as a lot of other black Ikea furniture in 1 very small room. Design crime? Probably.
– None of the cubbies had anything pretty (or even organized) in them – it was where we shoved bags/mail and other ugly things. If Expedit had some aesthetic merit OR lived there for a reason – you’d have a much happier relationship with it.
– With the white one, you wouldn’t have a problem with needing to dust every 5 minutes.
– With the desk attachment, I think you’re right – could be extremely useful to have everything work-related in easy reach.
– Ikea sells a lot of Expedit-shaped accessories like drawers, smaller cubbies & baskets — these could be gold!!!
Let me know how you get on!
Thanks Lauren!
I am going to measure the space that its going to occupy first, I think.
It does look compact, and hence, deceiving.
I’ll post pictures up on my blog and report back!
Rishi
Cool! (And measuring first…. what a concept. We buy & cross fingers).
Found this:
http://pastaqueen.com/blog/2010/08/assembling-the-ikea-expedit-workstation%E2%80%A6expediently/
The chair does lend some sense of scale so I know the comparative size.
This is the exact unit I want.
Now, the organization of stuff in and around the workstation is a different story…
BUT WAIT!!! I love EXPEDIT!!!
I own 4 of the 8 holer black jobbies…
I like BOOKS. Alot! And flat counter space. And sharp angles.
Maybe I am unoriginal? I love the lines it creates. Plus our house is all angles so no curvy corners for me.
We use 2 in our living room, as … you guessed it-room dividers! BUT!!! One has a TV/dvd/etc facing the couch and holds games, dvds, xbox, etc and the 2nd is right behind it, hiding all the cables, with plants on top and books inside! Facing the reading/fireplace area.
I thought I was a genius with this plan… I had no idea anyone could hate them.
The 3rd holds books, the 4th is in my office holding officey stuff.
I built them all myself in record time too.
I’m visualising how many books you have…. and how you can NEVER move. Wow!!! By the sounds of it you have actual rooms and space and doors — I think my (healed) Expedit hate comes from having far too much chunky black laminate stuff in one tiny, tiny apartment living/dining room. Don’t you find you’re always dusting though??
I love our large expedit bookcase but it is serving a very good purpose in our house right now in keeping all my kids toys organized and off the floor. We have the natural color so I don’t worry about the dust. :} Our formal dining room is serving as the kids playroom so it fits nicely in the nook where a hutch would go.
I purchased the storage bins and have everything organized in categories…books, puzzle, playdoh, paints. Those take the top to rows then each child has a few bins for the things they are interested in.
We purposely went with this one because the price was good and we figured the construction would stand up to the normal wear and tear from the kids. When the toy room goes away in a few years we will probably be able to sell if for a decent price and if not we still are not out a huge amount considering the use we got out of it.
I think for us the storage bins were a must have as it would drive me crazy to see all the toys on the shelves.
My husband still brags even after 25 years that he furnished his first apartment out of university for under $1000 from Ikea. My kids just roll their eyes when he tells them that every time we go there.